In many areas, it is desirable to remove slash to reduce the risk of wildfire and to improve the appearance of the property. Slash in this case refers to tree branches and other natural growth and residue on the ground. It may result from a variety of causes: after the cutting of timber; the natural falling of trees and branches; the death of various underbrush for a variety of reasons; as well as other causes. Slash primarily includes limbs and branches but not the trunks of trees. These limbs and branches generally do not have the useful applications that are found for the trunks (lumber, firewood) yet this slash is of greater potential fire danger.
The volume of slash, particularly in certain areas (e.g., the foothills of the Rocky Mountains) can be quite high and make it difficult to easily clear a given area. Additionally in the dry climate of much of the Western U.S., slash may take decades to decompose on its own. Adding to the difficulty of clearing a given area of slash may be the nature of the terrain. In certain areas, the terrain can be quite rugged and uneven which can drastically limit the type of vehicles that can access the area. In some areas, larger vehicles would do irreparable harm to the terrain either directly or indirectly through the need to construct or enlarge access roads.
Wood chippers can be used to “process” the slash and reduce or convert it to small wood chips that can be left in the area without significant wildfire risk and without looking as unsightly as slash. Wood chippers are often portable, being mounted on wheeled trailer frames suitable for towing behind a truck or van. Power is generally provided by an internal combustion engine from 10 horsepower (7.5 kW) to 100 horsepower (75 kW). There are also high-power wood chipper models mounted on trucks and powered by a separate engine. These models (which may include hydraulic input hopper feed systems) may also have a hydraulic crane, which can assist in feeding large objects (wood pallets, tree trunks) into these large chippers.
Because of the rugged terrain where it may be desirable to clear slash, it is typically not possible to drive a large truck (with a wood chipper mounted thereon) to the rugged area where the slash exists. Similarly, it may not be possible to drive a sufficiently-large truck/van (with a wood chipper in tow behind) to the rugged area. Accordingly, the current solution is to manually pick up the slash in the rugged area and drag or haul it to an area that the truck can access. This is, of course, very labor intensive, and thus often not carried out, leaving a vast collection of high danger slash available for potential wildfire ignition.
Even in areas where trucks can bring a wood chipper, there may be significant expense associated with driving a truck to that area, in addition to the large cost of a large truck (with trailored chipper and engine) based solution (current practice). What is needed, therefore, is a way to get a wood chipper to more rugged areas and to more economically get a wood chipper to less rugged areas.